BazermanMoore

CHAPTER
ELEVEN
Improving Decision Making
At this point in the book, you may be wondering why human judgment is so systematically
flawed. In fact, the situation is not as bad as it seems. After all, we are able to
perform computational miracles with the three pounds of gray matter between our
ears. To pick just two examples, our ability to understand verbal language and to recognize
human faces is far beyond that of even the fastest and most powerful computers.
Researchers who study judgment and decision making focus their work on the frailties
and shortcomings of human judgment because such examination provides the best opportunities
to understand the human mind. We learn the most about how we accomplish
our goals not by observing successes, but by taking account of failures. When do
we confuse one face with another? When do we confuse one word with another? Answers
to these questions have helped us understand how our minds process visual and
auditory information (Holt & Lotto, 2008; Yovel & Kanwisher, 2005). Similarly, the
study of judgment biases has revealed a great deal about how people make decisions.
The study of biases is also of immense practical value. Abundant evidence shows
that the decisions of smart managers are routinely impaired by biases. Studying how
organizations fail can provide useful lessons about what helps them succeed (Perrow,
1984; Ross & Staw, 1986; Sitkin, 1992; Weick, 1993). The good news is that many theories
suggesting interventions to improve decision making have emerged in the behavioral
decision research literature, and many of these interventions have been
developed and succeed in the real world.
One story of an effective decision-changing process appears in Michael Lewis’s
2003 book Moneyball. Lewis tells the story of how Billy Beane, the general manager of
the Oakland Athletics, transformed a baseball team by questioning the intuition of
baseball professionals. From 1999, when Beane took over as general manager of the
Oakland Athletics, through 2002, the team achieved a truly amazing record. The year
Beane took over, the team ranked eleventh of fourteen in the American League in
terms of payroll, yet placed fifth out of fourteen in wins. In both the 2000 and 2001
seasons, the Athletics ranked twelfth in payroll and second in wins in the American
League. In 2002, they were twelfth in payroll and first in wins in the league. Over this
four-year period, the team had the second-best record in Major League Baseball and
one of the two smallest payrolls in the entire American League. The players earned less
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